Page 32 of Jacob

Silence.

“How can we help?” Emma finally said and Jacob wanted to kiss her. Wanted to kiss all of them. All they ever wanted to do was help and their help was always massively useful.

Alex glanced at Jacob and he nodded. She was doing just fine. “Well, for starters, I’m wondering what is at Zalny now.” She typed numbers into the keyboard in front of her. “Jacob’s colleague Nikolai discovered that there has been construction work done there. If, as I suspect, Zalny is an illegal bioweapons lab, it must have been restructured because it had been abandoned after the fall of the Wall. Decommissioned. I just sent you the coordinates. Would you have a way to, I don’t know, go over past satellite footage to see how much work has been done on the site. It was left a concrete ruin back in 1989. A lot of work would have to have been done on it to turn it into a modern lab.”

“On it.” Emma and Hope bent over their keyboard and did what the women always did when tackling a problem—they disappeared into their computers. Jacob doubted whether they’d even notice an air raid siren going off close by.

“Also,” Alex said, “would there be a way to see if whatever entity is there ordered a CRISPR-Cas9?”

“A what?” Jacob asked. Alex had mentioned this but he couldn’t remember the context.

Now it was Riley’s turn to bend over her keyboard. “CRISPR,” she answered while pounding on the keys. “It’s a technology that allows geneticists to edit parts of the genome. Exactly what someone hoping to alter the smallpox virus would need.”

Alex nodded.

Once more, Jacob was astonished at the breadth and depth of the knowledge of these three young women. They were like Alex—super smart and understood the science and technology of the world.

If this thing could be stopped, these women would be the ones doing it. He and his men would be providing the infrastructure and muscle and, if necessary, the violence to stop it. But if this were Star Wars, the women were the heart of The Resistance.

“Thanks so much,” Alex said.

“Got it!” Hope shouted, fist pumping the air in triumph. She lifted her head, green eyes blazing, looking about twelve years old. “Up on the other monitor.”

Alex and Jacob turned to a big wall mounted monitor to the right. Alex frowned. “What are we looking at?”

And then the image came into focus and it was the Zalny site covered in snow. In fast forward, in jumping segments corresponding to an overhead satellite covering the area, then disappearing over the horizon, they watched as the small, crude, bunker-like building went away and trucks brought in building materials as excavators dug a massive hole. The hole was fortified with struts and a massive roof-like structure was erected, hiding the work underneath. Trucks came and went as the snow built, then melted, then the hills turned pale green and then dark green. And then the small crude building was hoisted back into place.

“How much time—” Jacob began when words appeared at the bottom of the screen. February 20-May 30.

Three months.

The Queens were all numbers women but Riley was the numberest of them all.

“So,” she said. “Let’s assume the underground lab has four floors. That about right, Alex?”

Alex nodded.

“And let’s assume a standard lab size. Let’s say, each floor 20 meters by 20 meters and a height of 3 meters.”

Again, Alex nodded.

“Walls and ceilings are usually about 20 centimeters thick. And I’m assuming the standard density of concrete, which is about 2,400 kilograms per meter cubed.”

“Go on,” Jacob urged. He’d have been hard pressed to establish those assumptions without a lot of research even if you had put a gun to his head. Riley had simply pulled them out of her head.

“So about 2,200 tons of concrete would be delivered to build a four floor underground lab.” She shook her head. “That’s a lot of concrete. And of course, it depends on how much they built laterally.”

“Space would not be a major concern for this kind of lab,” Alex said.

“They wouldn’t need a lot. The bottom story would be the level 4 lab. If there is one.”

“Hard to imagine all this effort without a BSL-4 lab,” Jacob said.

Alex sighed. “Yeah.”

Jacob could tell she was having problems processing everything. She took it for granted that anyone educated enough to build a lab would do it for the common good. It was her default setting—people worked for the good. The sun rose in the east, set in the west and people were basically good.

It had taken her three days to confront the fact that her colleague, Field, had decamped with a ton of knowledge in his head that could be used for terrible purposes. Her mind simply didn’t run along those tracks.

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